


Walking Woods

by CherFleur



Series: Pathfinder Backstories [1]
Category: Original Work, Pathfinder (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Child Death, Do not copy or post to another site, Gen, brief descriptions of war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:34:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23175508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherFleur/pseuds/CherFleur
Summary: Móraí had been walking for an extended length of time. Occasionally, she would put down roots for a few days to soak up some sun and listen to her sapling sing and laugh at all the new things.Normally, however, she moved to keep the sound of wood splintering and her brethren groaning at her back. Red water spilled over the land, and wood was the fuel for the war machine.She would not become a funeral pyre.
Relationships: Móraí & People, Trees & Life
Series: Pathfinder Backstories [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1666000
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Walking Woods

**Author's Note:**

> So! This is one of the characters origin stories for a Pathfinder campaign we're doing that I decided I could post. It's not the first character I've made, but I've never really thought about posting original things, so. This should be interesting, lol.
> 
> Let me know if you see grammatical issues or typos!

Awareness was a transient thing.

First, they remembered tasting copper and iron bathing their roots when young, just a sapling just breaching the surface of the earth. Many times, other creatures, bipedal and not nearly trampled them down, cracking a frail trunk that was still springy enough to heal over. To bend rather than break.

In their first centuries, they tasted more blood than water, and perhaps that shaped them, feeding and growing on the fallen in ways that the life cycle hadn’t quite meant them to. They were more aware than their fellows, though some had sipped of the red water more than others and so could echo with a bark beat in turn. They did not have hearts like the fleshlings that fed their roots and the soil, but the rings that marked time within them could pulse and grow in a similar fashion.

Time is a fleshly concept, but they remembered when the blood stopped flowing quite so heavily and instead they supped on sweet water tinged with what they learned was hope.

They learned that they had been born in war, and that they would have to learn the shape and taste of peace just as much as the ones who had ravaged in its name.

Some of the others in the grove grew silent at the stemmed red tide, unable to fuel their bark beat without the red water. A few quieted but never silenced, and some slept perhaps never to wake in the same way again.

Their second distinct memory was of sound vibrating their thick, heavy branches, bipeds stringing sound makers and cotton creations amongst their boughs. Sharp raucous sound came in waves of what they learned was laughter and creatures landed upon them to witness whatever joining it was that the bipeds chose their grove for. Music would shiver their leaves and send the soil around their thick, thick roots jumping in a way that could perhaps be called ticklish.

Often, they were adorned as such, though they couldn’t quite tell the frequency, waxing and waning as the seasons and wakefulness were. They learned that these things were called weddings or handfasts, that they were chosen as a spot of joining, just as they had apparently been the place for the end of war.

Endings, beginnings and that nebulous thing called change. They didn’t understand it but had witnessed much in their extended existence.

Their favorites, though, had to be when the bipedal fleshlings began to bring their newly sprouted seeds to them. The little things with their too soft bark would _pat-pat_ along the grooves in their surface, the tiny vibrations of their hearts pumping the red water through their veins echoed a thousands times over within their rings. The ground around their roots with tremble in delight at these little things, these little fountains of life and how their sweet laughter tickled just right.

These sprouts would learn to climb amongst their boughs, would press roughly made trinkets into their bark where they would gladly receive it. Cycles passed, and the sprouts grew and changed and stopped coming, but there were always more who came to visit them.

They gave them a _name_.

Móraí.

With it, they – _she_ gained so much more. The ability to shift limbs to catch the saplings as they slipped on her craggy bark, to shiver and shake to drop her leaves on delighted little fleshlings.

She could feel herself in a way she couldn’t before, could remember words and sounds, remember that things were more than how they fit into the cycle of life. The others were still sleepy, still stuck in autumns wake in a way that she never was anymore, not as Móraí where before she had been nameless.

Living took on a new meaning when she could understand the things that happened around her, could form an opinion when before simple existence had been enough.

So it was with this in mind, that she took to sheltering those who needed her beneath her boughs, to hiding those who needed hidden. It was these soft barked things with their tiny red water fountains that had made her what she was, even if it was supping upon their forebears that had made it possible.

These days, she preferred the sweet water of rainfall to the red water of these bipedal fleshlings, her roots reaching towards the rivers and creeks. Perhaps the saplings would damage their fragile bark and a droplet of red water would touch her surface, but she did not greedily sap them, as some of the sleepers might.

She was their Móraí, their grandmother tree, and she had learned so much in the course of her existence. She had learned hate and violence. She had learned peace and hope. She had learned laughter and love.

There was so much more to learn, and she would happily do so with these saplings crawling upon her for games and the joining of lives in her grove.

Until.

Until the day that the saplings did not come to play, when there was not planned handfasting and it was still warm in season.

Móraí learned _worry._ Móraí learned _fear_.

For days, they did not come, they did not call her name and run to her to seek her out for games or mischief. They did not come. They _did not come_.

Móraí learned _loneliness_.

She could have handled that, perhaps. The loneliness, the uncertainty of not knowing, but when one of the saplings stumbled into the clearing, into her grove, Móraí learned _rage_.

They leaked too much red water for their little form. Soft, useless bark torn and crying in ways that Móraí never had, tiny heart shuddering and guttering out like a summer fire. She reached out with her branches to pull this tiny, familiar form towards the shelter of her great roots towards the powerful bark beat of her own rings.

 _Please_ , she pleaded to the planet that gave her life. _Please, do not take them from me._

When their little sapling cried salty, inedible tears and curled up amongst them as she rumbled with the proof of her existence, Móraí learned grief. The little thing that she had so grown to love slipped from her grasp and faded into the cycle in a way that she had never wished to witness.

She waited and waited and _waited_ for someone to come to take the sapling home. To bury her in home soil the way that the fleshlings did for their own when they did not burn them, but no one came.

Móraí learned and wished that she hadn’t.

Shifting her roots gently around the broken little pile of bone twigs and fleshy remnants drained of red water, she buried the sapling herself. She sheltered this shell amongst her roots to be forever protected in a way that they were not in life, so far away from her.

Seasons passed and still no one returned. There were not more weddings and handfasts, no more feasts and festivals. There were no more saplings to watch over and call her name, no more laughter and games to enjoy.

There was silence, until the cutting began.

She sensed it before anything else, the others stirring at the sounds of axe and saw, wood cracking and breaking in the distance. Animals migrated quickly from the edges of the wood towards her grove to seek the protection of herself and the other red water grown. To hide amongst them as the fleshlings took from them without asking, without care in the way that the previous bipedal fleshlings had not.

Móraí missed her people with their little sprouts and saplings, missed the ones who she had grown around. It was clear, however, that they were gone, and something new, something destructive, was coming in their wake.

Having supped on war before, she did not think she wished to again.

It was during this continued cutting, however, that she felt the faintest, _faintest_ bark beat from between her roots. Where her last sapling had been buried in their own red water-soaked earth, a seed had formed and was sprouting. They were not large enough to protect themselves, and they were not small enough to keep hidden forever beneath her greater bulk.

This little one though, their light, tasted of laughter and games and so very _familiar_. Someone had listened to Móraí all those seasons ago, and they had not taken this sapling from them.

When the cutting got too close, she decided that _no one_ was going to take this sapling from her.

Reaching her branches down she curled her twiggy ends into the soft earth the little stem and leaves were swaying out of. She cupped them so carefully, leaving more than enough room for their roots to not be damaged as she lifted them out of the earth. Lifting them up, she carved a hollow into her bark large enough to protect it from being stepped upon as she remembered from her own sapling-hood. There would be no chance of breaking or cracking for this little one, not when Móraí was there to keep them safe.

With that taken care of, she tore herself from the heavy shell she’d worn for so very long, like pulling at the seams of a cocoon. The fleshings that cut and tore at her brethren around her screamed as bark exploded outwards, screaming from stress as she left her husk behind.

Vaguely, she was aware of the sight of the meters thick bulk of her that was left behind so that she could move without being hindered by her own weight. The comparatively smaller gap from which she had sprung and the way that the little things around her ran around and shook their cutting tools at her in fear.

Móraí didn’t care for them, though.

Growing another set of limbs, she curled them over the hollow in her middle that held the sapling to better protect it, and she walked.

She would go elsewhere. She would learn many things.

And perhaps, someday, the sapling would grow large enough to journey with her like this. Móraí liked the thought of that.

**Author's Note:**

> Móraí: an Irish word for grandmother.


End file.
